Empower your employees

If you want to succeed with empowered customers, you must empower your employees to solve their problems.

We call these empowered employees HEROes (highly empowered and resourceful operatives) and they’re the reason for the book. From working with many, many companies on social technology projects, we’ve found that the hard part is not just the strategy. The really hard part is running your organization in such a way that empowered employees can actually use technology to solve customer problems. Over and over again, we find these HEROes hamstrung by their own companies. No amount of shouting or idealism can solve this problem, since it goes to the heart of how companies run.

But you can’t just let people in your company build whatever they want. You need a new way of managing to get creativity without chaos.